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Well you know I am on the lookout for graffiti every time I travel, and New Zealand was no exception. I have to say, I was pretty disappointed that it doesn’t seem like a big scene over there. To be fair, I did see some nice pieces on my last day in Auckland as we were driving past some railroad tracks, but other than that and other than stencils, this first photo is very typical of most of what I saw. The handstyles in Auckland reminded me of Philly’s, if you squished them a little bit (all these pictures were taken in Wellington).

I saw quite a few stencils though, and most of them were pretty cool. There were also lots of little wheatpaste stickers (and some larger posters) around. I did notice that a lot of handstyles were on personal property, like fences or garage doors, as well as statues, churches, etc. You don’t see so much of that over here, it’s pretty frowned upon to deface those sorts of places.

For the rest of this entry I’ll just tell you about some little quirks about New Zealand I noticed while I was there.

Lingo was a big thing. Flip flops = jandals. Bathroom = toilet. Convenience store = dairy. Trunk = boot. Period = full stop. Rent = hire. Also they spell things differently, like tyre instead of tire.

The coffee culture is huge. There are cafes on every corner and they’re big on espresso. The most popular drinks I noticed were long black and flat white. The bar culture is also HUGE. New Zealanders drink at every meal (mostly wine, it’s pretty hyped up), and almost all the places we went to eat were bars. However, I did notice that most of the bars were very classy and upscale. I didn’t see any dives and very few sports bars.

They are very energy-conscious and serious about conservation. Anytime we checked into a hotel, we’d enter a completely dark and stuffy room. You had to take your hotel key and stick it into a slot on the wall to provide electricity for the lights and air conditioning. That way when you leave, everything turns off as well to save energy. There were also signs in all the bathrooms that basically said, “Washing towels and sheets every day wastes energy, if you want to save the whales, put your towels back on the rack and reuse them.”

People do not drive large cars or SUVs over there. There are compact cars, and then there are minivans. The only large sedans I saw were corporate cabs. I didn’t see one SUV the entire time I was there. Also, people don’t really drive pickup trucks to get around town. They are mostly used for utility trucks. Most of the cars run on diesel, and gas is sold by the liter.

One thing that stuck out to me was the large diversity of cultures in such a small place. I loved the fact that there were sushi stands on every corner, and each city we visited had a huge variety of restaurants. They were mostly Asian (lots of Korean and Japanese, some Chinese, some Malaysian), but also a ton of Turkish and Greek kebab places and several fish and chip stands. I saw a lot of Asian people and white people, and met a few people from South Africa, but only saw one black person the whole time I was there.

Rugby is life in New Zealand. Their national team is called the All Blacks, and you can’t walk down a street without running into their logo or seeing some sort of rugby paraphernalia. The only thing more omnipresent than rugby is sheep, which are everywhere. There are 4 million people in New Zealand, and 50 million sheep. They are taking over, seriously.

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